Final Appeal (22 page)

“Is that when he asked for a divorce?”

She looks at me like I’m crazy again. “Armen? Never. He loved her in his bones. She’s the one who called it quits.”

I don’t understand. “
Susan
was the one who ended the marriage, not Armen? But he told me she’d asked him to stay with her.”

“Through the campaign, because she needed a hubby to smile pretty for the pictures. Otherwise, that woman didn’t need him at all.”

I sit down in one of the chairs at the conference table. “I don’t know what to think, El. I don’t understand Armen. I don’t understand anything.”

“You’re takin’ this bad, girlfriend,” Eletha says. “What don’t you understand, baby? Mommy make it better.”

“I don’t know if Armen was a bad guy or a good guy.”

“A good guy. Next question.”

“I don’t know who killed him.”

“He killed himself. Next.”

I look at her in bewilderment. “How can you say that? You had a son with him.”

“That’s right.”

“You said he was a good father.”

“He was. The best.”

“How could he be? What kind of father leaves his own child?” I think of my own father, though I hadn’t started out thinking about him. Suddenly I need to know the answer to the question, burning like hot lead at the core of my chest. “Tell me that, Eletha. How can a father turn his back on his own flesh and blood?”

“Because he has no choice. Maybe the pain is too great to stay.” She shakes her head. “Look, you left your husband, didn’t you? Why?”

“He cheated on me,” I say, the words dry as dust in my mouth. “It’s not the same.”

“Yes, it is. You loved him, didn’t you? But you left.”

“I had to.”

“Right. You had no choice. Just because you left doesn’t mean you didn’t love.”

I feel a catch in my throat. I can’t say anything. I think of Sam, Armen, then my father. I need Ricki, fast.

Eletha folds her arms. “And I always thought you were so smart. Fancy degrees and all.”

“You just assumed wrong,” I say to her, and she laughs.

The marshals’ smelly gym is empty; it’s midafternoon. Against the wall is a huge mirror and racks of chrome free weights. A treadmill stands at the end behind some steppers. On the far wall hangs a poster of Christie Brinkley and beside it one of the electric chair. At the bottom it says:
JUSTICE—FRIED OR EXTRA CRISPY
? I kid you not.

“How can they have that there?” I ask Artie, who’s flat on his back, pumping a barbell up and down over his chest.

“Have what?”

“That poster.” I point, and his eyes follow my finger.

“Christie? She’s a babe. An old babe, like you.”

“The other one, whiz.”

He hoists the barbell up and down, exhaling like a whale through a blowhole. “I never noticed it. They let me work out here, Grace, I don’t give a shit about the artwork. Which rep am I on?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a lousy spotter.” He presses the barbell into the air.

I can’t take my eyes from the poster. The newspaper said that Hightower’s last meal was steak and an ice cream sundae. He ate the dessert first. After dinner he played Battleship with his guard, and the guard won. “Artie, if you were playing Battleship with a man who was condemned to death, wouldn’t you let him win?”

“What?” The barbell rises and falls.

“Wouldn’t you let him win? I mean, the man’s going to die.”

“I don’t know, would you?” He grunts with effort, his bangs damp from sweat.

“Of course. I let Maddie win all the time. What’s the difference? It’s a game.”

“Games matter, Grace.”

“Excuse me, I forgot who I was talking to.” I look back at the poster. The witnesses at Hightower’s execution said he shook his head back and forth as the lethal chemicals flowed into his veins. His feet trembled and his fingers twitched for about three minutes, and then it was over. Final, unknowable, and beyond this world. “Artie, what do you think about the death penalty?”

“What is this, menopause? Hot flashes and questions?”

“Come on. Tell me what you think.”

“I don’t think about the death penalty.”

“But if you had to say, how do you come out?”

He presses the barbell all the way up to a hook on a rack behind him, where it falls with a resounding
clang
. “It’s no biggie.” His arms flop over the sides of the bench.

“I thought you were against it.”

“That was when I was fucking Sarah. Now that she’s fucked me, it’s just fine.”

“You don’t mean that.”

He pushes his wet hair away from his forehead. “Yes, I do.”

“But think about the act. The actual act of killing someone.”

“I could do it, if he deserved it.”

“My, we’re in a macho mood.”

“You started it. This isn’t why I asked you to meet me in my branch office.”

I laugh. He has been spending a lot of time here, I gather because he’s out of work and avoiding Sarah. “All right. What did you want to talk about?”

“I wanted to tell you I was sorry about the other night. I drank too much. I wasn’t making any sense.”

“It’s okay. I understand why it happened.” Drowning your sorrows. I’ve done it exactly once.

“Thanks, Mom.” He rubs his chest, and sweat soaks through his thin T-shirt. I remember the basketball underneath.

“You still got that tattoo?”

“Until I find a blowtorch.” He sits up, straddling the bench, then sighs heavily. “Lifting sucks. I miss hoops.”

“You’re not playing anymore?”

“Nah. The team broke up.” He wipes his forehead with the edge of his T-shirt. “You know, before Sarah dumped me she told me something. She said you thought Armen was murdered.”

“I do.”

“Really?”

“Really. Why, what do you think? You gonna laugh at me?”

“No. I even thought of it myself, for a minute. After the way Galanter’s been acting.”

It surprises me. “You suspect Galanter?”

“I didn’t know about suspecting him, but if anybody did it, he did.”

“Why?”

“Besides the fact that he’s a dick?”

“Yes.”

“Because he wanted to be chief judge. He would never have been chief if Armen hadn’t died.” Artie straightens up, rallying. “And remember how Bernice went after him?”

“Do you think becoming chief judge is enough of a motive?”

He snorts. “What are you, funny? It’s the same as Battleship. It’s
winning
.”

“People don’t kill to win.”

“Sure they do. Plenty of people—mostly men, I admit—would kill to win. It’s ambition. Raw, naked, blind, cold. Ambition.”

I think of Galanter taking a bribe in
Canavan
and killing Armen to guarantee the result. That makes sense to me, in a perverse way. “I don’t agree. I think people kill for money—or love.”

“Love? Not Galanter, what does he know from love? He’s not even married, he lives for the frigging job. He has an Indian headdress, Grace. The man is not fucking kidding.”

“True.”

“As chief judge, he’ll get on all the Judicial Conference committees. Get to go to D.C., hobnob with the Supremes. It even positions him for the next appointment to the Court. Look at Breyer, he was chief.”

The Supreme Court. I hadn’t thought of that. Combined with
Canavan
, that’s one hell of a motive.

“It’s a place in history, Grace.”

I remember that Galanter has a collection of first editions in his office. “He would love that.”

“He sure would. It’s the top of the profession. They ain’t final because they’re right, they’re right because they’re final.”

“But Galanter’s a Republican appointee.”

“The Dems won’t be in forever, babe.” He looks down, then shakes his head. “Justice Galanter. That’s so beat. Can’t you just hurl?”

I consider this, and he’s right. I could just hurl.

25

I
slip my master key into the doorknob. It turns with a satisfying
click
, admitting me to the darkened chambers. No one’s there, as I expected; it’s too late even for geeks. I told my mother I had to work late, killing two birds with one stone: avoiding her and poking around. I enter the reception area and close the door quietly behind me.

The computer monitors are on, standing out like vivid squares of hot color in the dark, wasteful but helpful.
ORDER IN THE COURT! WELCOME TO THE THIRD CIRCUIT COURT WORD PROCESSING SYSTEM
! guides me through the reception area, where the blinds are down.

The chambers are laid out like ours, with the judge’s office to the left. I walk into Galanter’s office; even at the threshold it stinks of cigar smoke. The far wall is entirely of glass, like Armen’s, overlooking the Delaware. The lights from the Camden side make bright wiggly lines on the black water.

In the light from the wall of windows I can make out Galanter’s glistening desk, also of glass. I walk to it with more nervousness than I want to acknowledge and whip out the flashlight I keep in the car; it says
WALT DISNEY WORLD
. Official burglary tool, patent pending.

I flick on the flashlight with an amateurish thrill and flash it around the room. Next to Galanter’s desk are the same shelves we have, where Armen used to keep the current cases. Galanter does it the same way. I look over the shelves. The circle of light falls on each stack of red, blue, and gray briefs, the colors regulated by the Third Circuit’s local rules. Attached to the briefs with a rubber band is the appendix in each case and the record. That’s what I’m looking for.

I sort through a bunch of criminal cases, all sentencing appeals, and a commercial contract case; the Uniform Commercial Code seems less interesting to me than it used to. Underneath the stack, at the very bottom, is
Canavan
and its record. I tug the
Canavan
papers off the shelf and settle down on the floor.

I pull off the briefs and appendix to get to the record. I expect to find a stack of blue-backed pleadings bound at the top, but the papers are stuffed in a yellow envelope.
SEALED COURT DOCUMENTS
, says a forbidding red stamp on the envelope. A court order is taped underneath.

Why would a district court seal this record? In any event, it doesn’t apply to me, at least not tonight.

I plunge into the envelope, pulling out the first part of the record. On top is the complaint, which alleges that Canavan Flowers was driven out of business by a group of local flower retailers. The defendants listed Bob Canavan on their FTD-like telephone network but never sent him any orders to fill. The complaint is a poorly drafted litany of the ways Canavan was starved out, but never explains why. The young lawyer couldn’t flesh out the Mob connection. Neither can I.

A ring of florists
? Galanter laughed.

I flip past the complaint and skim the appendix until I come to the names of the wholesalers. I take the crumpled crossword puzzle Winn gave me from my pocket and compare it with the papers, sticking the flashlight in my armpit. None of the names are the same. The list of wholesalers’ names reads like white bread, the list of mobsters’ names like Amoroso’s hoagie rolls. I put the pleadings aside in favor of the depositions. If there’s gold to be found, it’ll be here. Something that isn’t what it seems.

I read the first deposition, then the second and the third, fighting off a sinking feeling. None of the names are the ones on the crossword; none of the allegations amount to anything other than common law fraud by a bunch of rather hard-assed florists. Isn’t that what Townsend said?
How is it different from a case of garden variety fraud
? Was he speaking from the casebook or the checkbook?

I start the next deposition, given by one of the vendors. An inadvertent reference to a delivery-man sounds familiar. Jim Cavallaro. I look down at the short list on the crossword puzzle:

James Cavallaro.

It must be the same man. I think a minute.

Of course.

The Mob couldn’t care less about the carnations; it’s in the delivery. In the trucks and the truck drivers. In an operation that runs by phone orders, the delivery is where the money is to be made. It doesn’t matter what’s being delivered, even something that smells like roses.

I leaf back to the other depositions, looking for references to the truckers. I scribble down the names, but there’s only a few. My next step is to check Galanter’s phone log to see if any of them made calls to chambers, or if there’s any other connection to Galanter.

Suddenly I hear the jiggling of the doorknob in the reception area to Galanter’s office. I freeze, listening for another sound, but by then it’s almost too late.

The door opens, casting a wedge of light into the reception area. I flick off the flashlight and shove the record back onto the shelf. If this is Winn, I’ll bludgeon him with my Pluto flashlight.

Where can I hide? I look around the room.

Galanter’s private bathroom. Right where Armen’s was, off a tiny hall leading from the office. I scoot into the bathroom and slip behind the door, willing myself into stillness.

Whoever’s coming in has a flashlight of his own.

He strides into Galanter’s office as if he doesn’t have any time to lose. He casts the flashlight this way and that, throwing a jittery spotlight at the bookshelves, then at the couch and back again. All I can see of him is that he’s big-shouldered, an ominous outline above the blaze of the flashlight. Too heavyset to be Winn. I withdraw behind the bathroom door, afraid.

The figure strides to Galanter’s desk. His back is to me as he aims the flashlight on the papers piled neatly on the glass surface. He touches each pile; his hand is hammy as it falls within the flashlight’s beam. He seems to be looking for something, rapidly but with confidence. He’s been in this office before, it seems. He had a key, unless he picked the lock.

His hand moves over the desk like a blind man reading Braille. He finds something and picks it up. I squint in the darkness. He holds a wrinkled piece of yellow paper in the beam of the flashlight. It must be a phone message; we use the same ones. They’re printed on thin paper so they’ll make a carbon copy. They tear constantly.